Vol. 32:2

Twenty generations of genealogy manage with one verb for dying; afterwards the Bible uses five more, sometimes two or three at once for a single death. Works through them, and lingers on gathered to his people, which fits Abraham badly — he was buried in a cave he bought, deliberately severed from family and birthplace. Perhaps the phrase outgrew the family tomb it came from.

One visit split across two books, or two visits? The rabbis mostly say one, which raises the chronological problem of whether Jethro came before or after Sinai. Nahmanides reads the silence about the revelation as proof he came before, takes his acknowledgement of God as no rejection of idolatry, and reads his abrupt dismissal that same day as a retraction — leaving Numbers 10 to record a second visit, and Moses trying to keep him.

Exodus names the twelve stones of the breastplate but never the order of the tribes engraved on them. Josephus says birth order, perhaps because as a priest he had seen it; Rashi, who had not read Josephus, says the same on common sense alone. Then a second conjecture, that Dan sat on the seventh stone — which rests on a deduction rather than a text, and is where the agreement ends.

Cain thought of sacrifice first, unprompted, and brought the fruit of ground God had cursed — the harder labour of the two. So why is Abel named first and his offering heeded? And how did Cain learn it was not? Argues the offerings are not the point: God's reply is about doing right and mastering the urge at the door, making choice the theme, and the lie rather than the unpremeditated killing the grievous act.

If a patriarch's standing rests on relationship with God, the liturgy may name the wrong figure in the middle generation. Sets Abraham's many encounters and Jacob's dream at Bethel against Isaac's, and argues that in their own generation it is Rebekah, not Isaac, who has the active relationship — a case for saying the God of Abraham, Rebekah and Jacob.

A boy of six is slapped for sitting in a stranger's High Holy Day seat; two shrinking congregations break off a merger over who gets the folding chairs. Vayera closes with Abraham returning to his place, li'mkomo — and Makom is a name for God. Set against that, Heschel's insistence that Judaism sanctifies time rather than space, and the sages' reason for not knowing where Sinai is.

Commentators reach for the science of their own generation, which means a reader needs medical history to follow them. Takes one case: innate heat, Galen's answer to how a body holds its temperature — housed in the heart, driving growth and digestion, and needing respiration to cool it or it consumes itself. That doctrine held until the eighteenth century, and it turns up throughout rabbinic exegesis.

Halevi and Maimonides hold that the Tetragrammaton is the only proper name and all others are descriptions, yet the tradition teems with names — six more the scribe may not erase, a twelve-lettered and a forty-two-lettered name the Talmud mentions but withholds, and Rashi says are lost. Then the ways the name is carried in code: the twenty-six refrains of the Great Hallel, the acrostic of Yedid Nefesh, the windings of the tzitzit.

Not arbitrary demands made for God's glory: Maimonides has them for man's benefit, Nahmanides for his refinement. Sets out the classifications — duties toward God and toward one's fellow, Saadia's rational and revelational, the Talmud's ordinances that would have had to be written anyway against statutes Satan objects to — and the ethical imperative of imitatio Dei underlying all three.

Nine words, repeated three times, became the cornerstone of the kosher kitchen. Traces each term's expansion — kid to bison and turkey, boil to eating and any benefit, mother past parenthood, milk to all dairy, then separate dishes and finally a waiting period that Maimonides put at six hours and Poland at one. And the older question of whether such a law's reason should be sought at all.